Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Marriage and Subversion

  OF ALL THE ACTIONS OF A MAN'S LIFE, HIS MARRIAGE

  DOES LEAST CONCERN OTHER PEOPLE; YET OF ALL THE ACTIONS OF

  OUR LIFE, 'TIS THE MOST MEDDLED WITH BY OTHER PEOPLE.

  --John Selden, 1689

  By late October 2006, we had returned to Bali and settled back into Felipe's old house in the rice fields. There, we planned to wait out the rest of his immigration process quietly, with our heads down, inciting no more stress or conflict. It felt good to be in a more familiar place, good to stop moving. This was the house where, almost three years earlier, we had first fallen in love. This was the house that Felipe had given up only one year earlier in order to move in with me "permanently" in Philadelphia. This house was the closest thing to a real home that we could find right now, and man, were we happy to see it.

  I watched Felipe melt with relief as he wandered around the old place, touching and smelling every familiar object with an almost canine pleasure. Everything was the same as he had left it. There was the open terrace upstairs with the rattan couch where Felipe had, as he likes to say, seduced me. There was the comfortable bed where we had made love for the first time. There was the dinky kitchen filled with plates and dishes that I had bought for Felipe right after we met because his bachelor accoutrements depressed me. There was the quiet desk in the corner where I had worked on my last book. There was Raja, the neighbor's friendly old orange dog (whom Felipe had always called "Roger"), limping about happily, growling at his own shadow. There were the ducks in the rice field, wandering about and muttering among themselves about some recent poultry scandal.

  There was even a coffeepot.

  Just like that, Felipe became himself again: kind, attentive, nice. He had his little corner and his routines. I had my books. We both had a familiar bed to share. We relaxed as much as possible into a period of waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide Felipe's fate. We fell into an almost narcotic pause during the next two months--something like our friend Keo's meditating frogs. I read, Felipe cooked, sometimes we took a slow walk around the village and visited old friends. But what I remember most about that spell of time in Bali were the nights.

  Here's something you wouldn't necessarily expect of Bali: The place is bloody loud. I once lived in a Manhattan apartment facing 14th Street, and that place was not nearly as loud as this rural Balinese village. There were nights in Bali when the two of us would be simultaneously awakened by the sound of dogs fighting, or roosters arguing, or an enthusiastic ceremonial procession. Other times, we were pulled out of sleep by the weather, which could behave with startling drama. We always slept with the windows open, and there were nights when the wind blew so hard that we would wake to find ourselves all twisted up in the fabric of our mosquito netting, like seaweed trapped in a sail-boat's rigging. Then we would untangle each other and lie in the hot darkness, talking.

  One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In it, Calvino described an imaginary town called Eufemia, where the merchants of all nations gather at every solstice and every equinox to exchange goods. But these merchants do not come together merely to trade spices or jewels or livestock or textiles. Rather, they come to this town to exchange stories with each other--to literally trade in personal intimacies. The way it works, Calvino wrote, is that the men gather around the desert bonfires at night, and each man offers up a word, like "sister," or "wolf," or "buried treasure." Then all the other men take turns telling their own personal stories of sisters, of wolves, of buried treasures. And in the months to come, long after the merchants leave Eufemia, when they ride their camels alone across the desert or sail the long route to China, each man combats his boredom by dredging through his old memories. And that's when the men discover that their memories really have been traded--that, as Calvino wrote, "their sister had been exchanged for another's sister, their wolf for another's wolf."

  This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow. Felipe's private history becomes a piece of my memory; my life gets woven into the material of his. Recalling that imaginary story-trading town of Eufemia, and thinking of the tiny narrative stitches that comprise human intimacy, I would sometimes--at three o'clock in the morning on a sleepless night in Bali--feed Felipe a specific word, just to see what memories I could summon out of him. At my cue, at the word I had offered up to him, Felipe would lie there beside me in the dark telling me his scattered stories of sisters, of buried treasures, of wolves, and also more--of beaches, birds, feet, princes, competitions . . .

  I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.

  "Please tell me a story about fish," I requested.

  Felipe thought for a long while.

  Then he took his time in the moonlit room to recount a memory of going fishing with his father on overnight trips when he was just a little kid back in Brazil. They would head off to some wild river together, just the child and the man, and they would camp there for days--barefoot and shirtless the whole time, living on what they caught. Felipe wasn't as smart as his older brother Gildo (everyone agreed on this), and he wasn't as charming as his big sister Lily (everyone agreed on that, too), but he was known in the family to be the best helper and so he was the only one who ever got to go on the fishing trips alone with his father, even though he was very small.

  Felipe's main job on those expeditions was to help his dad set the nets across the river. It was all about strategy. His dad wouldn't talk to him much during the day (too busy focusing on the fishing), but every night over the open fire, he would lay out his plan--man to man--for the next day about where they would fish. Felipe's father would ask his six-year-old son, "Did you see that tree about a mile up the river that's halfway submerged? What do you think about us going there tomorrow, to investigate?" and Felipe would squat there by the fire, all alert and serious, listening manfully, focusing on the plan, nodding his approval.

  Felipe's father was not an ambitious guy, not a great thinker, not a captain of industry. Truthfully, he was not very industrious at all. But he was a fearless swimmer. He would clench his big hunting knife in his teeth and swim across those wide rivers, checking his nets and traps while he left his little boy alone back on the bank. It was both terrifying and thrilling for Felipe to watch his father strip down to his shorts, bite that knife, and fight his way across the swift current--knowing all the while that if his father was swept away, he himself would be abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

  But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father's beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air, swimming, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact sound that his father's arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters: "Shush-a, shush-a, shush-a . . ."

  And now that memory--that sound--swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe's father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe's father at all anymore, and only one of them--until the moment Felipe shared this story with me--recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

  This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

  This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alc
hemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father's swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil--all of this, too, has somehow become me.

  A few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.

  According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I'd passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe's immigration application. If all went well--if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiance visa--he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and only a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.

  As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone's questions. Truthfully, I hadn't planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.

  I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancee, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears. Chekhov wrote, "If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say."

  Yes! Think!

  I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod--and I'd never even heard of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren't there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, "You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy." But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

  Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn't have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still . . .

  My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn't really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, "What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?"

  I committed to no such thing.

  She tried again: "What if I just happened to throw a big party while you guys were at my house, but you and Felipe wouldn't even have to come downstairs? You could just lock yourselves upstairs with the lights off. And when I made the wedding toast, I would casually wave my champagne glass in the general direction of the attic door? Is even that too threatening?"

  Oddly, indefensibly, perversely: yes.

  When I tried to sort out my resistance to a public wedding ceremony, I had to admit that part of the issue was simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one's family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one's first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn't they all seen this film already? One's credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing. And Felipe, too, had once before sworn lifetime vows only to leave the marriage after seventeen years. What a pair we made! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness.

  Furthermore, I could never forget what the etiquette columnist Miss Manners has to say on this very subject. While expressing her conviction that people should be allowed to marry as many times as they like, she does believe that each of us is entitled to only one big fanfare wedding ceremony per lifetime. (This may seem a bit overly Protestant and repressive, I know--but curiously enough, the Hmong feel the same way. When I'd asked that grandmother back in Vietnam about the traditional Hmong procedure for second marriages, she had replied, "Second weddings are exactly the same as first weddings--except with not as many pigs.")

  Moreover, a second or third big wedding puts family members and friends in the awkward position of wondering if they must shower repeat brides with gifts and abundant attention all over again. The answer, apparently, is no. As Miss Manners once coolly explained to a reader, the proper technique for congratulating a serial bride-to-be is to eschew all the gifts and galas and simply write the lady a note expressing how very delighted you are for her happiness, wishing her all the luck in the world, and being very careful to avoid using the words "this time."

  My God, how those two indicting little words--this time--make me cringe. Yet it was true. The recollections of last time felt all too recent for me, all too painful. Also, I didn't like the idea that guests at a bride's second wedding are just as likely to be thinking about her first spouse as they are to be thinking about her new spouse--and that the bride, too, will probably be remembering her ex-husband on that day. First spouses, I have learned, don't ever really go away--even if you aren't speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism. "We know you better than you know yourselves" is what the ghosts of our ex-spouses like to remind us, and what they know about us, unfortunately, is often not pretty.

  "There are four minds in the bed of a divorced man who marries a divorced woman," says a fourth-century Talmudic document--and indeed, our former spouses do often haunt our beds. I still dream about my ex-husband, for instance, far more than I would ever have imagined back when I left him. Usually these dreams are agitating and confusing. On rare occasions, they are warm or conciliatory. It doesn't really matter, though: I can neither control the dreams nor stop them. He shows up in my subconscious whenever he pleases, entering without knocking. He still has the keys to that house. Felipe dreams about his ex-wife, too. I dream about Felipe's ex-wife, for heaven's sake. I sometimes even dream about my ex-husband's new wife, whom I have never met, whose photograph I have never even seen--yet she appears in my dreams sometimes, and we converse there. (In fact, we hold summit meetings.) And I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in this world my ex-husband's second wife is intermittently dreaming about me--trying in her subconscious to work out the strange folds and seams of our connection.

  My friend Ann--divorced twenty years ago and happily remarried since to a wonderful, older man--assures me that this will all go away over time. She swears that the ghosts do recede, that there will come a time when I never think about my ex-husband again. I don't know, though. I find that hard to picture. I can imagine it easing, but I can't imagine it ever going away completely, especially because my first marriage ended so sloppily, with so much left unresolved.
My ex-husband and I never once agreed on what had gone wrong with our relationship. It was shocking, our total absence of consensus. Such completely different worldviews are probably also an indication of why we should never have been together in the first place; we were the only two eye-witnesses to the death of our marriage, and we each walked away with a completely different testimony as to what had happened.

  Thus, perhaps, the dim sense of haunting. So we lead separate lives now, my ex-husband and I, yet he still visits my dreams in the form of an avatar who probes and debates and reconsiders from a thousand different angles an eternal docket of unfinished business. It's awkward. It's eerie. It's ghostly, and I didn't want to provoke that ghost with a big loud ceremony or celebration.

  Maybe another reason Felipe and I were so resistant to exchanging ceremonial vows was that we felt we'd already done it. We'd already exchanged vows in an utterly private ceremony of our own devising. This had happened back in Knoxville, in April 2005--back when Felipe first came to live with me in that odd decaying hotel on the square. We had gone out one day and bought ourselves a pair of simple gold rings. Then we'd written out our promises to each other and read them aloud. We put the rings on each other's fingers, sealed our commitment with a kiss and tears, and that was it. Both of us had felt like that was enough. In all the ways that mattered, then, we believed that we were already married.

  Nobody saw this happen except the two of us (and--one hopes--God). And needless to say, nobody respected those vows of ours in any way whatsoever (except the two of us and--again, one hopes--God). I invite you to imagine how the deputies of the Homeland Security Department, for instance, might have responded back at the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport if I had tried to convince them that a private commitment ceremony held in a Knoxville hotel room had somehow rendered Felipe and me as good as legally married.